Silverlight vs ASP.NET for Business?

Question

Which of these two technologies has bigger demand today? I have plenty of free time this summer so I was thinking of learning either ASP.NET or Silverlight 4, and get an internship this coming Fall.

If you've read my other question here on SO "Financial Market Developer Dilemma" then you already know that I am planning to work in the financial industry a few years from now. So my questions are:

• Which technology would benefit me more in the long term: Silverlight or ASP.NET?
• Which one pays more $$$?
• Which one has higher demand?
• What is the learning curve like for ASP.NET and Silverlight?

Thanks in advance!

UPDATE 1: I've decided to focus on ASP.NET. I am currently reading Beginning ASP.NET 4: in C# and VB (Wrox Programmer to Programmer). Awesome book and it's fun to read it too! I will update this post in the future if I get to do any serious ASP.NET projects for the companies. Going with ASP.NET doesn't mean ignoring Silverlight. I am still planning to learn Silverlight and use it together with ASP.NET but that's much later :)...

Answer 1

My leaning is to Silverlight. That being said, you should know I am a wWPF/Silverlight programmer. The nice thing about Silverlight is that you get a "two-fer"--it gets you about 90% of the way to WPF. What with RIA and web services such, it is way better for "near real-time apps" and much easier to do then (to my mind) then AJAX. And, best of all, you can avoid javascript. Oh, and with Silverlight 4, you can interface with COM, and desktop devices now--especially printing.

Answer 2

I would suggest starting with ASP.NET. It will give you a better foundation and understanding of the whole web call stack. From there Silverlight won't be that hard to pickup. I would also think that there is a greater demand for ASP.NET developers than for Silverlight (at least for now).

Answer 3

There are many more opportunities for ASP.NET developers than for Silverlight, and it's likely to remain that way for some time. Several reasons:

• ASP.NET has been around for much longer than Silverlight
• There are many parallels between ASP.NET and other mainstream web development technologies like PHP and JSP, so it's not just ASP.NET fuelling the popularity of its paradigm
• In the minds of many IT shop managers (particularly the stodgier ones developing business apps), Silverlight is still an unproven technology
• Despite the many advantages of a technology like Silverlight over traditional web development methods, the web standards lobby is vocal and adept at spreading FUD about Microsoft's "agenda" regarding its proprietary systems. (As a corollary to that statement, I would never claim that Microsoft would take the unprofitable route just to appease popular opinion -- only that they seem to have learned that poor opinion tends also to be unprofitable.)

Answer 4

I would say ASP.Net if you're dealing with the financial industry. While Silverlight has it's uses for small tasks in such an industry (scanning controls, calculators, uploaders etc) I don't think it will ever be used as their primary technology. ASP.Net is perfectly capable handling the typical needs of a financial application without the drawbacks and added complexities of a Silverlight application.

Answer 5

While I have a leaning on Silverlight, I would recommend that you should concentrate on ASP.NET + MVC first.

Why? First you need to build on your basics. ASP.NET+MVC would allow you to brush up your basic C# skills developing POCO (plain old CLR). It also instilled upon you the discipline of the layering your application. MVC gives you that separation of concern emphasis discipline. In most financial applications, you have to implement the business rules imposed upon your application and in your "Model" is the right place to implement these rules and validation. Next, you would also need to learn about the many ways of interacting with the backend database. You would have to learn about basic OLEDB or entity framework or an ORM framework to interact with your persistent layer. You may also need to separate your web application with an application layer and communicate between these two layers via WCF.

As you can see, you have a lot of technologies to grasp. It is not a matter of just Silverlight and ASP.NET. You have to deal with the domain aspects of your application.

Regarding your other questions,

Which technology would benefit me more in the long term: Silverlight or ASP.NET?

Depends. But ASP.NET would give you the foundations.

Which one pays more $$$?

$$$ is always a bad thing to base your interest on. Of course if you are paid well for your job, it is a bonus but you should base your quests on your interest.

Which one has higher demand?

In the current market, you will find more jobs in ASP.NET.

What is the learning curve like for ASP.NET and Silverlight?

ASP.NET is easier to grasp. Silverlight is more specialised. You would have to understand the XAML and binding paradigm and the many widgets in Silverlight. There are also the communication, security (sandbox) aspects that you would have to understand to be a competent Silverlight developer.

Last but not least, I hope you would post an update of yourself in 2 years time answering this post again :p

Answer 6

I would stronlgy say asp.net MVC is going very strongly and it has nice future compare to Silverlight. I hopes silverlight will die once HTML 5 is released and people started using. HTML 5 has almost all features which silverlight doing now and also HTML would be very fast compare to Silverlight applications.